"Wallpaper Video": "The entity known as the News American was formed by a final merger of two papers, the Baltimore News-Post and The Baltimore Sunday American, in 1964, after a 191-year history and weaning process. Those newspapers each had a long history before the merger, in particular the Baltimore American which could trace its lineage unbroken to at least 1796, and, traditionally, it claimed even earlier antecedents to 1773. Other precursor newspapers The News and the Baltimore Post were founded in 1873 and 1922, respectively, and broke new ground in graphics, technology, journalistic style, and quality of writing and reporting."  "The Baltimore News-American was a broadsheet newspaper published in downtown Baltimore, Maryland until May 27, 1986. It had a continuous lineage (in various forms) of more than 200 years. For much of the mid-20th century, it had the largest circulation in the city." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baltimore_News-American  

When I was a kid, my conservative mom told me that the News American was a trashy newspaper.  My family subscribed to the competitor newspaper, the Baltimore Sun.  It wasn't until I was an adult that I realized that the News American was just more 'progressive' than the Sun was. 

My friend Angus asked me if I wanted to go see the demolition of the News American building where he planned to shoot footage on April 9, 1990.  I went with him & we watched wrecking balls destroy one side of the building.  It was interesting to see the eradication of the physical evidence of a newspaper that competed with what was now the only surviving daily paper.  

At the time, I was working for a copy shop.  An employee at a different branch, Larry Cherniak, had a home video studio where he could add titles electronically - that was still something that was generally not accessible to me in 1990.  Larry was generous enough to allow me to use his title generator.  Since it could generate blank rectangles I decided to play with those as frames more than to use the actual title possibilities.  I imagined the result as something to be projected on a wall, filling it, as "Wallpaper Video", perhaps as an installation.  It amused me to think of 'wallpaper' as footage of a wall being destroyed.  I've used excerpts from this as what I call "Usical Material" in "Concrete Mixing": particularly as raw material in live video mixing situations.  

This is a minor work but I still think it's valuable to share as a representative of an approach I only tried once.  I like that I've made 703 movies to date & that there's a huge amount of variety among them, this contributes to that variety.  

- November 11, 2022E.V. notes from tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE  

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